Modern web engines are basically mini operating systems. Long gone are the days where a web browser just needed to render basic HTML pages, handle some simple protocol actions, and render images.

To build something that supports all of the latest web standards, is secure, is always up to date, and on top of all that, is performant, requires a large group of very skilled devs working constantly on all those components.

Web development, for better or worse, has become a massive and rapidly evolving ecosystem that is constantly morphing and changing. Web apps are becoming the standard, and even “simple” modern websites are absolutely filled with different widgets and frameworks for all the different elements they contain.

If a very large/rich org or company decided to dedicate a whole team of devs to build a FOSS web engine, it could happen, but that used to be Mozilla, and look how that has slowly been failing.

What person with a website that has any significant traffic would willingly break it for 80+ percent of its users? That will never happen, sadly.

Really sad to hear this, I just found out about Ondsel recently. Glad to hear FreeCAD is getting their merges, but I really would have liked to see Ondsel find a market all its own.

Different distros for different uses:

• Debian with KDE for my casual servers and Docker boxes.
• Nobara for my main gaming PC.
• Linux Mint with Cinnamon for my general purpose PCs and my #JustWorks uses.
• Arch for my pimp mobile test machines.

At a place I worked at previously, there was a guy who got fired because the company found out that he had been hiding cans of beer in the water tank part of the toilet.

Yes…you read that right, he would “take a bathroom break” so he could pound a beer a few times throughout the day lol.

I wouldn’t critique it that much honestly, except for the fact that he operated heavy equipment for his job, so yeah, not safe at all.

10 seconds? That’s generous.

My current company just got bought out earlier this year, we are in the process of rolling all our stuff into their IT infrastructure.

I was lucky enough to get to use Debian as my OS on my old company laptop because I was the only IT at this company. Last week they finally issued me my new corporate laptop, which of course is Windows because the company that bought us out is a 100% Microsoft house.

One of their sys admins was on a call with me to get the laptop set up and working on their VPN, MFA enrollment, it was supposed to be a “quick 15 minute call.”

I watched him as he fought remotely with my machine for almost an hour. The VPN wouldn’t work no matter what he tried, then the GUI started acting up, then RDP wasn’t working right, then MFA wasn’t working. This was a brand new installation from their golden image too on a brand new high end laptop.

After about 20 minutes, I told him I was gunna stay on the call muted and to just let me know when everything was working properly. Then I hopped back onto my Linux laptop and spent the rest of the call getting actual work done while their new Windows machine was pooping the bed.

He didn’t actually even get it working at the end of the hour lol. He had to remote in later that evening to finish doing a bunch of registry fixes and file purges to finally get the VPN to connect.

My experience exactly. My current company is rolling out new W11 laptops as the old ones age out.

I’m consistently amazed at how poorly Windows 11 runs on these brand new, $1500 enterprise grade machines. They all have the latest Intel i7 chips, 16GB of DDR5 memory, Nvme 1TB drives, 1440p beautiful screens, and they perform like ass.

Constant lockups, stuttering, slow to wake up, slow to open programs, the fans constantly spin up super loud with almost nothing running in the foreground.

I see frequent GUI glitches and bugs, literally had the WiFi stop working on one yesterday, just wouldn’t connect to anything and the tray app wouldn’t pop up when clicked. Had to restart the whole computer and log in again to get it to connect.

Meanwhile, the 11 year old retired desktops that I repurposed for internal company resources like Open Project, Uptime Kuma, and Ansible are running plain old Debian with KDE Plasma and are rock solid. They never crash, never freeze up, are always super responsive, and are fast to update. The longest one of them has taken to update was maybe 3 minutes?

Windows on the other hand… Lets just say there’s a reason I push updates at the end of the day.

You fell for the meme lol.

Arch is great if you want very high levels of customization without having to get into compiling and coding, like with Gentoo or NixOS.

I think of it as the distro equivalent to custom keyboard kit, you get all the parts and can swap them out as much as you want. But you’re not designing and fabricating your own circuit board and microcontroller, writing your own custom firmware, getting a custom case modeled and fabricated, etc.

There’s a reason “I use Arch, BTW” Is a meme.

I’m mean, it’s literally in the name. These are not concepts that require a degree to understand, much less an hour long meeting.

Logout means ending your user session, restart means your computer turns off and then comes back on, and shutdown means it turns off and stays off.

The buttons are all in the start menu, they are clearly marked, and these concepts have existed for 30 years at least.

It’s like driving a car for decades and not knowing what the difference between reverse, drive, and neutral are.

“X is down/broke.” No, Kelly, the internet isn’t “down.” You typed the URL wrong in your browser.

People will state it like the entire company has lost internet connectivity, or an entire department cannot access files or run a certain program, when actually, only a single user is having a problem.

Also people not knowing the difference between log out, restart, and shutdown. Even after explaining it to them.

Defs use a P2P VPN solution like Tailscale, Netbird, etc.

It’s more secure anyways and allows finer control.

As much as I can get it, and more every year.

All my computers run Linux exclusively. Gaming desktop, personal laptop, Steam Deck, work laptop, and all my servers in my home lab.

Hypervisor is XCP-ng, VMs are a mix of Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and some random other Linux distros for testing and experimenting.

My NAS is a TrueNAS Core box.

I’m in the process of switching my router to PFSense.

Phone is a Pixel 6a with GrapheneOS.

Email, VPN, and cloud storage is Proton.

Password manager is Bit Warden.

Office docs are all Libre Office & Only Office.

The only non-FOSS software I use constantly is Discord and Steam, and of course, most of the games I play. On my phone I have majority FOSS apps for everyday stuff, but some things are still proprietary.

I’ve seen the same thing. IT departments are less and less interested in building and maintaining in-house solutions.

I get why, it requires more time, effort, money, and experienced staff to pay.

But you gain more robust systems when it’s done well. Companies want to cut costs everywhere they can, and it’s cheaper to just pay an outside company to do XY&Z for you and just hire an MSP to manage your web portals for it, or maybe a 2-3 internal sys admins that are expected to do all that plus level 1 help desk support.

Same thing has happened with end users. We spent so much time trying to make computers “friendly” to people, that we actually just made people computer illiterate.

I find myself in a strange place where I am having to help Boomers, older Gen-X, and Gen-Z with incredibly basic computer functions.

Things like:

• Changing their passwords when the policy requires it.
• Showing people where the Start menu is and how to search for programs there.
• How to pin a shortcut to their task bar.
• How to snap windows to half the screen.
• How to un-mute their volume.
• How to change their audio device in Teams or Zoom from their speakers to their headphones.
• How to log out of their account and log back in.
• How to move files between folders.
• How to download attachments from emails.
• How to attach files in an email.
• How to create and organize Browser shortcuts.
• How to open a hyperlink in a document.
• How to play an audio or video file in an email.
• How to expand a basic folder structure in a file tree.
• How to press buttons on their desk phone to hear voicemails.

It’s like only older Millennials and younger gen-X seem to have a general understanding of basic computer usage.

Much of this stuff has been the same for literally 30+ years. The Start menu, folders, voicemail, email, hyperlinks, browser bookmarks, etc. The coat of paint changes every 5-7 years, but almost all the same principles are identical.

Can you imagine people not knowing how to put a car in drive, turn on the windshield wipers, or fill it with petrol, just because every 5-7 years the body style changes a little?

Pretty pessimistic, short term (the next decade or two.)

I am optimistic about socialism and anarchism very long term (the next 100-1000 years,) maybe just because I try to remain hopeful on stuff like this.

Humanity has created some incredible things, we have so much potential to be a boon for the planet, for the animals, and for each other. But we must oust Capitalism, corporatism, statism, and fascism to even have a chance.

Interesting. Seems like my situation is pretty specific to the US. Lots of folks from other countries that seem to have much cheaper options by default.

Right on. I do need unlimited, as my job requires me to be on the road a fair bit and accessing lots of data.

But that’s a good idea, I’ll see if my carrier offers that option.

I’ve been thinking of using Linkwarden for a while now. As my computer usage spreads across more and more devices, having a single place to go for all my bookmarks would be fantastic.

Interesting, seems like Europe has some really cheap options, much cheaper than the US.

Nice! Maybe Europe has it better, (wouldn’t be the first time lol.)

Almost everybody I know has something like this, growing up as a teenager it was the same too.